A programme of ten workshops for Fèis Rois and Dingwall 800

Herring Season | Tèamhair an Sgadain with Olivia and Maureen Ross

Early September. The East Coast herring season is at its height: the fleet and the gutting crews followed the fish southward – Wick and Caithness first, then down through the Easter Ross ports, Balintore among them, before moving on to Fraserburgh, Peterhead and further south by October.

For generations, women from the Highlands and Islands travelled with the season, gutting and packing up to sixty barrels a day, living at the harbourside, and sending money home. This session explores their work, songs, and knowledge – specifically the work songs that kept pace with the knife, that named the ports and the people, that held community together across distance.

This session welcomes musician Olivia Ross and Maureen Ross from Balintore. Drawing on Fèis Rois’s ‘Kin and the Community Project’ celebrating the life of Belle Ann MacAngus (1889-1980) – a Gaelic speaker from Hilton in the Seaboard Villages – we will listen to archive voices and learn some herring songs ourselves.

Format: talk, archives, conversation, singing, tea and cake.

About the programme

From late summer to midwinter, these sessions invite you to dig where you stand: to explore the cultural memory of Dingwall and its surrounding landscape. Countless generations before ours had a closer connection to nature and the changing seasons, bound up with a sense of community and conviviality across the rhythm of the agricultural year. Each week we explore a different part of that world – from stories of drovers, herring girls and radical resistance, to harvest seeds, plants and birds, to the music and song of the winter ceilidh. Part conversation, part creative workshop. Drop in for one session or follow the season as it turns. Open to all. Bring what you know!

Background

This programme was developed by ethnologist and creative practitioner Mairi McFadyen for Fèis Rois and Dingwall 800, exploring the cultural and ecological memory of the local area through conversation and creativity. Dig Where You Stand takes its name from an international public history movement that invites communities to research and reclaim local histories.

Description supplied by the event organiser.